EXHIBITION: HOW ARE YOU LIVING? HOW ARE YOU THRIVING?

OPENING: 26/09/2024, 12.00 – 19.00

Artists: Tamara Turliun, BRDA Foundation (Zofia Jaworowska, Petro Vladimirov), the Nearest Bomb Shelter project (initially developed by Bickerstaff agency for the 60th Venice Biennale)
Curated by Oleksandra Pogrebnyak and Katie Zazenski

This exhibition will open during FRINGE Warszawa 2024 
26.09 | 12:00 – 19:00
27.09 | 12:00 – 19:00
28.09 | 12:00 – 19:00
29.09 | 12:00 – 19:00

It’s in early childhood that you first hear the story of an old pumpkin greeting his motley family of vegetables. This tale intertwines with later discoveries of your own family tree, stretched across far-reaching parts of the country, shaped by decades of various historic and personal circumstances. In the late 1940s, after my great-grandparents returned to their native village in central Ukraine – displaced for work in Germany during WWII – they expanded into a family of eleven. Two decades later, my grandmother, coming from this big family, married my grandfather, from another large family of eleven. I reflect on how these family bonds have faded as the ongoing military events reveal some of the traces left behind by the wars of the twentieth century.

There are many versions of the questions asked in the children’s folk song from which the title for this exhibition is taken. Some accounts provide very straightforward interpretations of the pumpkin calling to his relatives, “Are you healthy? Are you alive?” while others proclaim “Are you safe and sound? Are you alive, maybe not?” We’ve chosen what might be considered a slightly more poetic version of these questions that pumpkin asks to his wife (yellow melon), his sons and daughters (cucumbers), his sisters (carrots) and other relatives (beans and beets)… He checks in with his family, wondering who is growing and will make it through the season and if not, how to plan for the next years. It’s a song of care and kinship and generation for that which grows from the soil and for those with whom we live and love.

The exhibition How are you living? How are you thriving? features three projects that have been nested together as a commentary on the role of art, art spaces, and culture-based communities in activism, particularly in Poland and Ukraine since the 24th of February 2022. In the space of Stroboskop, Tamara Turliun introduces the traditional Ukrainian craft of vytynanka (ukr.: витинанка) – paper cutouts inspired by vegetables included in the aforementioned song reference the enduring strength of family bonds and kinships and the sustaining, agricultural relationships humans have with the soil. The depicted characters from this song, entitled “The Pumpkin Walks in the Garden”, are adhered to windows which have been collected by the BRDA Foundation for PROJECT WINDOW. Since June 2022, BRDA has been collecting windows from private individuals, developers, and companies to send to a group of Ukrainian partners, including Unity and Strength and Svoi Lydu, for rebuilding homes and other structures that have been damaged or destroyed during military actions undertaken by russia. In the past two years they have collected and transported more than 2,200.

The third work in this exhibition, located throughout the city of Warsaw, is the open-source project Nearest Bomb Shelter, created by the Bickerstaff agency for the Ukrainian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). The project, somewhat absurd in a city like Venice where there is no threat of material war, takes on a slightly different tone in a city like Warsaw – geopolitically in a very different set of crosshairs. I first remember noticing the «укриття» (eng.: shelter) signs made with red spray paint that appeared all over Kyiv, my hometown, in 2014. Today, knowing the location of a suitable shelter is natural, even though we don’t always use them. A lot of architectural forms can actually serve for protection – from the more obvious, like underground metro stations, parking lots, or basements of residential buildings, to the less typical but widely available in the city, such as shopping malls, bars, or even an art gallery – if it is located below ground level. You can also find safer spaces in your own apartment behind two walls: you need one to stop the shockwave from the explosion and the other to protect from broken glass and debris.

I don’t even consciously see anymore the paper thunderbolts which have been painted red and stuck to each window in my apartment in Warsaw since October 2020. And as we come up on the four year anniversary of making and hanging these little symbols of resistance, it seems it’s not yet time to remove them as the referendum to lift the ultra-conservative and quite frankly lethal near-total abortion ban was just weeks ago voted down again. When hundreds of thousands in Poland took to the streets to protest various human rights violations in 2020 and 2021, February 24, 2022 gave us a new reason to mobilize. Within hours of the announcement of the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine, statements were being published and resources started being gathered. Perhaps what is most striking to note is that in Poland, these efforts to organize – to welcome those fleeing unimaginable circumstances, provide support, shelter, information, solace – were by and large organized by ordinary people, many of whom are active members of our art and culture communities. BWA Wrocław Główny was almost immediately transformed into a shelter; displaced peoples were temporarily rehoused in the exhibition space, which coincidentally was showing a project about migration and mobility by multi-national artist Yael Vishnizki-Levi. The Solidarity House of Culture “Słonecznik”, supported by the Museum of Modern Art, was active nearly immediately and formally established within one month of the full-scale invasion. And what started as a site of sandwich-making, medicine collection, and general crisis-intervention has over the course of these nearly three years, transitioned into a cornerstone of the Warsovian community, regularly hosting meetings, meals, and other culturally-focused events centered on solidarity, education, and decolonization.

Once the exhibition at Stroboskop ends, the bomb shelter posters will remain taped to different walls throughout the city and the windows, along with their paper vegetables, will be distributed throughout Ukraine, donated to families in urgent need of repairing and rebuilding that which has been damaged by war.

Curatorial text written by Oleksandra Pogrebnyak (PinchukArtCentre) and Katie Zazenski (Stroboskop).

The exhibition will be on view by appointments util 11/11/2024.